What We Carry Home
From the Publisher | November/December 2026
Christmas has always been full of homecomings.
We sing about them. We make films about them. Airports fill with people trying to get back in time. Families recreate meals they have eaten for generations. We unpack ornaments that have survived moves, marriages, children and decades. We play the same music and tell the same stories because, for a little while, we want Christmas to feel the way we remember it.
But there is something those Christmas stories don’t always tell us.
Sometimes you can’t go home. Sometimes the house is gone. Families scatter across countries and oceans. Relationships end. Communities change. People leave because they have to, or because there is nothing there for them anymore.
And sometimes the person who made a place feel like home dies.
There are losses from which we don’t simply recover. Life continues, because it does, but continuing isn’t the same thing as getting something back. There are empty places that remain empty, and Christmas has a way of making us particularly aware of them.
Maybe that is part of the reason traditions matter so much at this time of year.
Not because they can undo loss. They can’t. A song cannot bring someone back, and a recipe cannot recreate the kitchen where you first tasted it. Speaking a language cannot return you to the village your family left generations ago. An old Christmas custom cannot stop the world around it from changing.
But all of those things can carry something forward.
That idea kept appearing as we worked on the November/December stories for CelticMFF.
In Irish Christmas in America, fiddler Oisín Mac Diarmada and generations of musicians have spent more than twenty years carrying Irish music, stories and Christmas traditions across an ocean. Some of the musicians who helped carry them are no longer here. Others have taken their place. The people change, but the music continues.
I’ve watched another version of that happen over decades with the Glengarry Bhoys. Their music grew from the Scottish and Irish traditions carried into Canada, but they have never treated tradition as something that belongs behind glass. I’ve traveled with them, danced to that music and watched it become part of new memories for people whose own families may have crossed an ocean generations ago.
Tradition stays alive because somebody keeps playing it.
We found the same idea in very different places. In the Irish film Abode, the familiar promise of “home for Christmas” runs into the reality that home itself is not guaranteed. In Wales, The Ghost of Midwinter reaches into the old tradition of winter storytelling to make something new. It doesn’t preserve the tradition untouched. It gives another generation a story of its own.
Tradition stays alive because somebody keeps playing it.
And there is plenty of joy in this issue, too. We’ll visit Christmas markets and winter festivals, listen to music, meet artists and makers, explore traditions, share food and discover celebrations across the Celtic world and its diaspora.
There should be joy here. Carrying something forward isn’t only about grief.
Sometimes it is cooking something your grandmother taught you to make, even though yours never tastes quite like hers did. It is teaching a child a song, dancing to a band you’ve heard a hundred times, or hearing a fiddle across a crowded room and recognizing something in it before you even know why.
Traditions survive because people keep choosing them.
Sometimes it is speaking words your ancestors carried across an ocean. Sometimes it is a room full of strangers singing a song everyone somehow knows. And sometimes it is simply gathering with people you’ve never met before and discovering that, for an evening, nobody feels quite so far from home.
Traditions survive because people keep choosing them. We take what was handed to us, add something of ourselves and hand it on. That is how traditions travel across oceans and generations, and how they remain part of people’s lives instead of becoming artifacts of a world that no longer exists.
Maybe that is one of the quieter truths beneath all our Christmas homecomings. Home is not always a place we can return to. Sometimes it is something we carry. We cannot keep everything, and we cannot keep everyone. But we can decide what we carry with us.
And sometimes what we carry becomes part of someone else’s home, too.
— Laureen MacBradaigh
Publisher, CelticMFF